Mailmerges To Move Through Initial Pipeline Stages
The first stages in a pipeline are always lower-touch, efficient tasks designed to be light-touch, “reminders,” to get a conversation going. The chance that any given opportunity within the first couple stages will ever become a sale is much lower than later stages, yet at the same time there is an imperative to actually touch a larger quantity of people within these first two stages.
In that sense, the beginning of the sales pipeline is actually more related to, “promotions” in the sense that a large number of highly efficient meetings or messages much be exchanged to start a meaningful conversation and explore where intersecting value may lie.
Difference Between Leads & First Stages of Pipeline
We define the first two stages (in the above example, Prospecting and Qualification) as individuals who we have actually either physically met with, communicated by email or phone previously and individuals who have expressed interest in what we have to offer, as well as our assessment that they may have a potential product fit. As such it is important to first keep the pipeline within our sales database in Insightly as clean and clear as possible according to this definition. This means consistently updating Insightly as we go along and talk with people throughout the day.
Leads are defined as just lists of people, with no prior communication, but with whom we believe may have an interest in communicating about what we offer.
Updating Opportunities within Insightly
The most important items (which we will call “Messaging Items”) for the purposes of messaging to update within Insightly are:
Opportunity Stage in Pipeline (and associated value)
Main Contacts for Opportunity
Main Contact Phone Numbers & Emails
This will become more clear further in this article why these Messaging Items are so important to keep our contacts updated.
To view and update opportunities within Insightly to ensure our Messaging Items are up-to date on a consistent basis, you start out by going to the toolbar on the left hand side of the screen, and click, “Opportunities”:
Opportunities will show an ordered view of what kinds of opportunities exist at the moment based upon the filter that you select. Filters may be selected (and modified) in the upper left hand portion of the Opportunities dashboard. It’s helpful to view opportunities under a given filter as a Kanban Board, which can be selected as a display option in the upper right. This way Opportunities can be more quickly and easily changed by drag and drop as you go along.
To change the Messaging Items for a given Opportunity, you have to navigate within an opportunity and within contacts to update the information as needed.
Let’s start out with an opportunity. Click on the blue Opportunity name within a given Kanban board.
Within that Opportunity, you will be able to control the Messaging Items which include:
The Opportunity name itself will be important to distinguish upon exporting which opportunity is under consideration for a given email message.
Opportunity Stage in Pipeline (and associated Value)
This information can actually be controlled within the Kanban board, so you don’t have to pay attention to it here, but for reference this is the location within the Opportunity control panel. If you need to change things on the fly and move it out of the first two stages or kill it as, “Lost,” do so here.
Main Contacts for Opportunity
This is actually a bit more hidden. Underneath the Pipeline control panel, click, “Related.”
Then within “Related” you have a dashboard that looks like this:
You must have at least one contact within a given opportunity in order to be able to send messages. Contacts are shown on the left hand side where the arrow above pointing to (1) is shown. If there is no contact attached to an opportunity, you have to add it with, “Add Link.”
Main Contact Phone Numbers & Emails
In order for messaging to work, each Contact has to have an Opportunity that it is associated with, but it also has to have contact information, namely, email. You can inspect each Contact by clicking on the blue Contact Name shown above where Pointer (1) is pointing at.
Within that menu, you will see the following:
Organization it is associated with
Phone number is of course helpful for follow-up but not absolutely necessary at this point.
In order to add an organization if it does not exist already, then you can click on “Organizations” on the left hand tool bar as shown below.
Within that menu, click on “New Organization” in the upper right hand. Once the organization is created, then you can go back and associate the Contact with the Organization, and save the Contact.
Post-Sales-Database Updating - Moving Updates To Action
Once we are confident that our database within Insightly is properly updated as shown below, we can use the information within that database to set up larger, “mass” messages which are specifically crafted such that they will not be spam, but rather, “reminders” to get a conversation started.
These messages can be followed up with phone calls, also drawing from information that we have within our sales database in Insightly. The first step to export this information is to go into “Reports” on the menu bar shown on the left hand side.
Within Reports, you can go to “My Personal Reports,” within the Reports Folder...
...and select the, “Contact Info - P/Q: XXX” for the given list of people that you are looking to try to send messages to. You can also use the search bar at the top and type in “Contact Info” for a list of all Contact Info reports.
Within that report, you should see a list of Contacts shown by Email Address, First Name, Last Name, and Organization. This is basically a filtered list of all of the P/Q (Prospecting and Qualifying) contacts for the given Opportunity Report shown within the titles. All of this information is customizeable based upon filters within the report dashboard above this list.
From here, click, “Export To Excel” as shown in the image above where the Arrow is pointing toward.
Within Excel, you may see that there are a number of lines with blank spaces. To clean these up, select the whole sheet by pressing CTRL+A and then go into “Data >> Remove Duplicates.” Simply press, “Remove Duplicates” and that should get rid of the extra white space rows.
Once you have this process finished, then go into our Google Drive and navigate to the appropriate place where we will keep mailmerges for sales contacts. Side note - you can look at our navigation structure by going into the Google Drive Control Document. We will guide through where we are sorting mail merge information below.
Within the Control Document...under the “Navigation” tab, you can click on, “Moving the Pipeline: Mailmerges.”
This opens up a folder in which we keep all Mailmerges based upon a timestamp at which we did the mailmerge. Within this folder, you can set up a new Google Sheet file and title it with the timestamp and purpose for which you are looking to create a mailmerge.
The timestamp can be written in the format “YYYYMMDD_Title” with “Title” containing the purpose of the mailmerge.
In this case we will set up a file as follows, based upon the date of authoring this document.
Now, within this Sheet we would like to set up a mailmerge, which we can use an add-on tool that we have purchased to accomplish. So at the top, go to “Add-ons” and then navigate to, “Mail Merge with Attachments” and then, “Enable Mail Merge.”
This will enable the Mail Merge add-on, but you will still need to set up a Mail Merge template, clicking as shown below:
After this is done, you will see a Mail Merge database having been started under the “Mail Merge” tab as shown below:
From here you can simply copy and paste information from the Excel Spreadsheet above into this file, which is the source of truth for which we will use to send out mail merges using our Messaging Items as discussed above.
To add a new field, simply add a column within the Mail Merge spreadsheet, and title the column at the top according to the field you wish to add, in this case, “Company.”
After the column is added and you have transferred information from Excel, you may notice that there may be gaps in the data. Individual lines may be missing email addresses, organization names, First Names, Last Names, etc.
At this point it may be tempting to physically change and update the information directly within the spreadsheet to make corrections, however this is not the proper way to do things. The best way to do things is to actually change everything within Insightly, and then re-do the process.
If you are in a hurry and just want to get an email to go out, then the suggested procedure is as follows:
Missing Emails: For any lines in which we are missing email information, don’t worry about it - they won’t send anyway, and the Mail Merge can be re-run after that information is re-populated later.
Re-categorized as Leads: If we can’t find the missing emails at all, then within Insightly these opportunities should be re-categorized as Leads rather than Opportunities until we find their contact information.
Other Missing Information: Names, Organizations, etc: We don’t want to send out emails that are unprofessional, so if you are in a hurry and need an email to go out, then delete the email for the given contact, and create a task to update Insightly later.
You can also go in and edit within this spreadsheet and Insightly simultaneously.
Overall, the most important thing is to Update Insightly, that is the main source of Truth, not this Google Sheet. These Google Sheet mail merges are temporary.
Setting Up the Mailmerge Template
The mailmerge template may be set up by creating a Draft in Gmail, and then inserting fields which respond to the column headers shown in the above section. So to start off, let’s set up a draft and add appropriate fields within the draft. To add fields, you simply use the convention of surrounding each field name with {{Double Brackets}} as shown below.
Note that each item within the double brackets correspond to a column header, as shown below, for example {{First Name}}.
Within the message itself, you can set up new columns which contain new information that you would like to add into a draft email. For example, you could add a custom message under, {{Custom Message}} and then add a new column containing that information, as shown below.
Within each row, you can set a specific {{Custom Message}} or {{Custom Greeting}} or use whatever other column heading tag (A.K.A. variable) to set up a message that you would like. Let’s look at an example. Below is a message that we wrote out which differs from row to row depending upon who receives it and at what stage in the contact process we are in with them.
Note that each row has a different message, and that hypothetically you can have as many categories of messages as you want, or you could just send the same message to everyone. You may choose to group people as follows and send out message accordingly:
A) People who you haven’t talked to in a while.
B) People you have never talked to.
C) People who you have talked to about a specific thing recently.
Each greeting and message that you send could be set up accordingly. You could send out three different types of messages to each of these groups, and you could customize line by line if needed. The email itself will simply fill out each {{Custom Field}} with the cell in question for that given row.
Once you have this set up appropriately, you can set up a test email to send to yourself to ensure that the email is looking as you expect it to. Let’s do that now, as follows. Under Add-Ons >> Mail Merge With Attachments, go to “Configure Mail Merge,”:
Configure the mail merge on the toolbox which pops up, adding in your email, plus a reply-to email address that points specifically to you, your name, etc. so that each email is a personal mail.
Once you have entered in your email sending information, click “Continue” and then set up the campaign name and email tracking as shown.
Then, click continue and select the Google email draft that you were just working on that coordinates with your fields/variables.
Finally, to start off with, send out a test email by clicking, “Test Email.” It is recommended to always send out a test email to test the layout of the email so that it doesn’t look “funny,” to the recipient.
Once you have sent out the test email, you can review what the email looks like within your own inbox.
As we can see, the variables lined up nicely, although we added the wrong variable - instead of {{Custom Message Closer}} we added {{Custom Closer}} into the email itself, so we will go back and add that in or correct the column header name before sending out another test message.
Also keep in mind that this only tests for the first row of the email, not for every row, so if you have dramatically different email structures that have been written out, things may appear strange in different groups and people further down the email list. If you want to be thourough, test each row type. If you want to make things easier, just keep it simple.
Tracking emails are important because we would like to know whether someone 1) Opens an email in the first place and 2) Clicks on a particular link, to know whether we are making any progress within the sales funnel.
Hypothetically, if people do not open our emails and do not click on our links, then we should be eliminating them from our list roll (and within Insightly, actually downgrading them to a Lead rather than an Opportunity). This will help our overall forecasting and understanding about how big our pipeline actually is vs. what do we wish it to be, which helps in overall accounting and financial planning.
For attendees of events, we manage this process through Mailchimp, which works better for general awareness marketing. The strategy outlined in this guide is more for sales marketing, meaning mass messaging for Prospecting and Qualification. It’s more of a, “message management system,” than a pure Email list, because there are a lot more opportunities for message customization based upon the recipient.
If you look at the link within the email we sent, you will see that a new link was actually created which looks like this:
That domain can be used by our tracking program, Google Analytics, to filter out how many people are actually responding to our email campaigns that we send out. If we never get anyone ever coming to our page from these emails, we know that we are doing something wrong. We can create an automatic sales engagement report based upon the sales emails that we send out on a regular basis and use that to help improve decision making.
